Answer Engine Optimization is how your products get recommended when a shopper asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini what to buy. Two of my clients are now getting about 7% of their sales from AI, so this is a real channel, even though it's still under 1% of retail traffic overall.
In this episode I walk through the two halves of AEO work: on-site, which is the structured data and content that controls how AI understands your products, and off-site, which is the third-party citations that determine whether AI actually recommends you. Then I show three client stores live across all three AI engines. All three got identical on-site work through Datify. Mulberry Park Silks and ReptiChip rank at the top. Healing Home Foods doesn't appear at all. The difference is entirely off-site.
Also covered:
Why AEO is not SEO, and why unlinked mentions matter more than backlinks
What's happening to Reddit, and why you shouldn't build your strategy on it
The citation tactics that are actually reachable for a small brand with no PR budget
A five-query test you can run this week to score where your store stands
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